Negative concord in Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish

• In Event: Language ideology with Respect to Yiddish

Abstract

Yiddish has been described as a language with strict negative concord: neg-words such as KEYNER ‘nobody’ or GORNISHT ‘nothing’ require the presence of sentential negation (Zeijltra 2004, van der Auwera and Gybels 2009):

1. Gornisht iz *(nisht) ongekumen.
n-thing is not arrived
‘Nothing arrived.’

As Germanic languages typically do not allow negative concord (Giannakidou 2002), this fact has been argued to be the result of contact with Slavic languages (van der Auwera and Gybels 2009).

Today the dominant variety of Yiddish, Contemporary Hasidic Yiddish, is primarily spoken in Haredi communities in the USA, Israel, the UK, Canada, and Belgium. Thus, most of its contact languages do not exhibit strict negative concord. CHY has undergone recent, pervasive grammatical change (Belk, Kahn and Szendrői 2022). The questions therefore arise whether CHY also exhibits strict negative concord, and whether any developments can be attributed either to contact with new languages or to wider grammatical change.

Like earlier varieties, CHY neg-words almost obligatorily require the presence of sentential negation. There is, however, one exception: when GORNISHT ‘nothing’ appears preverbally, sentential negation is dispreferred:

2. Ikh hob gornisht gezen.
I have n-thing seen
‘I haven’t seen anything.’

This order is not the result of focus, topicalization or contrast, but is if anything the most neutral option. Furthermore, the lack of sentential negation is not available with other neg-words.

3. Ikh hob keynem *(nisht) gezen.
I have n-body not seen

Existing typologies of negative concord do not appear to allow for varying strictness according to lexical item.

Existing descriptions of negative concord in Yiddish (e.g. Mark 1978, Jacobs 2005, van der Auwera and Gybels 2009) focus on historical varieties or are based on corpus analysis, and therefore lack negative evidence and less common constructions such as elliptical answers. Using primarily native speaker judgments, this talk will examine the properties of negative concord in CHY and especially how they fit in to existing typologies of multiple negation. I will argue that CHY has undergone surprisingly little grammatical change in this respect but that it is nevertheless distinct from its contact languages and historical Yiddish.

Author

• Zoe Belk, University College London